The present study poses the question: Is there a definite article in spoken Finnish? Finnish is traditionally said to lack a definite article. Recently, however, several researchers have proposed that one of the Finnish definite demonstrative determiners, se, has in fact developed into a definite article in present-day spoken Finnish. The process responsible for this development is held to be grammaticalization, the normal process through which lexical morphemes develop into grammatical morphemes, and grammatical morphemes into other, even more abstract, grammatical morphemes.

The answer to the question posed is sought through a combination of methods. The study is based on a large empirical material, consisting of 138 oral retellings of a non-verbal cartoon in Finnish, by both monolingual and bilingual speakers of Finnish, and by both adult and adolescent speakers. This empirical material was then evaluated in functional/typological terms, in light of what we know has happened in other languages which have acquired definite articles. What are the typologically common characteristics of definite articles and demonstrative determiners? In what kind of uses do we find the two categories in the languages of the world? How does the use of definite determiners in the empirical data studied here fit the functional/typological description? This evaluation, in conjunction with a refinement of grammaticalization theory, whereby a criterion of obligatory use in specific contexts is proposed as a litmus test of grammaticalization, results in a complex picture of the proposed process of grammaticalization of a definite article in spoken Finnish. From the point of view of spoken Finnish in general, the data suggests that there is no definite article in spoken Finnish. However, on the level of individual speakers, a case can be made that at least some individuals exhibit a definite article pattern of se. Through a combination of individual case studies and statistical analysis at both the group and individual levels, it was found, however, that even these individual patterns were heavily circumscribed by sociolinguistic factors having to do with both the level of context-dependence and age-grading.